


Hypocrite

by sxetia



Category: Cyberpunk 2077 (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Depersonalization, Drabble, Gen, Guilt, Johnny's trying his bestr, Joshua Stephenson mentioned, Missing Scene, Relationship Study, Suicide mention, V isn't a great person, female v, murder mention, post-They Don't Go Where I Go, suicidal ideations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-18 19:27:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28623288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sxetia/pseuds/sxetia
Summary: Judge, jury, executioner, and pawn. V is all four.
Relationships: V & Johnny Silverhand
Kudos: 24





	Hypocrite

"What's the big occasion, huh, V? You don't even smoke – tryin' to gimme a treat for bein' a good boy, like I'm some kinda pet?"

Johnny's voice blipped into the faintest corners of V's cognition. When she unshielded her eyes and brought her face away from her palm his permanently-disheveled silhouette paced back and forth between the nonspaces of her mind; heavy boots stomping all over her synapses and leaving boot prints in her gray matter. She saw Johnny in the same sense that one smelled bullshit, the same way that one had a bad taste in their mouth after a job – like this one – didn't sit well in their stomach. Intangible, unexplainable, incorporeal, but unavoidable. Could shut her eyes, block her ears, but none of it changed the fact that he was there. V had discovered a sixth sense, one dedicated wholly to ensuring that Johnny Silverhand had a front row seat in the theater of her mind twenty-four-seven.

Wine-red aviators twirling between chrome fingertips. Greased-up mullet swaying and obscuring ambiguous features. Epicanthic folds taut over beady eyes, wrought with scrutiny like the fucker couldn't just pop open her brain and take a look. Maybe it was a matter of respect. Maybe he just liked fucking with her, making her say it. They had enough vitriol to go around, frayed as their circumstances had left them.

Worst of all was that Johnny was right. V didn't smoke; never had, not before Johnny Silverhand started to play fengshui with her frontal lobe. The Relic played plastic blocks with tidbits of her personality, swapping out pieces with a dexterity and sleight of hand that left her none the wiser until the moment came: an affinity for handguns in spite of a lifelong love affair with the knife, for example. A taste for loud music, hard booze and soft girls – she couldn't be certain if her nascent attraction to Judy was genuine or just Johnny wanting to stick his hands where they didn't belong, in more ways than one. Most presently relevant of all was her inexplicable craving for nicotine, in spite of somehow having never picked up the habit in all of her years on the streets. Probably didn’t hurt to pick up the habit, considering that chrome lungs couldn’t develop cancer (and that her days were numbered anyways), but it left V with a distinct, implacable feeling of distress. Johnny used to have to ask when he wanted a smoke. Now it was V who wanted one.

At what point had Johnny’s habit become V’s? More presently, how many of their shared traits — brash vulgarity, rude disposition, lack of hesitance to kill, hatred for corpos, bleeding heart — were now Johnny’s, V’s originals having been undetectably slipped away?

She thought about all of this in the span of about a second while she took a long drag from the cheap cigarette. The smoke billowed out of her nostrils as she spoke aloud, almost like Johnny was there in the flesh. “I don’t know — stressed out, I guess. Cravings kick into high gear during times like this.”

“Like _what?_ ”

“You know goddam well what I’m talking about.” V spat and padded out the space between thoughts with another drag. “...All of that bullshit.”

“With Stephenson? What, you gettin’ cold feet about it two hours after the fucker bled out? Bit late.” V felt Johnny’s arms flared out to the side in exasperation. She suspected that his insistence on constant movement was his own little way of asserting the fact that he was rooted in some form of subjective reality or another.

A knuckle rest against a black upper lip, then she shook her head. “No, nothin’ like that. I don’t regret killing the fucker, I just kinda feel like if I was gonna do it I shoulda domed him when he first stepped outta that NCPD van. Not—… not whatever the fuck that was.”

“Woulda just been a _waste._ ” Johnny shook his head. Couldn’t tell if he was mocking her or if he did it because of her. She was probably just being paranoid.

“A waste of _what,_ Johnny?” V finally sat up and stared out into the nothingness that Johnny Silverhand occupied. He had his flesh-and-blood hand parked against the streetlight, staring down at his host’s bench-perked form as she ranted into empty night air like a cyberpsycho. “A waste of precious corpo profit? A waste of family-killer scum? A waste of—… one more fuckin’ revolutionary who’s deluded into thinking he’s gonna save the world? Christ, I bet you only pushed me to go through with it ‘cause you thought you could achieve somethin’ through his victory.” 

Hell, maybe her decision to go through with it was all because Johnny wanted to go through with it. V had long ago surrendered the very notion of agency, fully helpless to her fate as a pawn of the powers that be. It was all she had ever been — any job, any time, any place if the eddies were right.

Johnny’s frustration, disgust and — what the fuck — pain bubbled in her stomach. He pushed off, started with that pacing act again, looked away, then at her, then away. When she shut her eyes his body ceased to exist, but that bitter anxiety stuck like concrete. “Woulda been a waste of a man who had something to say. I dunno _what_ the fuck that guy was trying to convey to Night City by bleedin’ out on a virtu, but _fuck me,_ I bet he got it across perfectly well!”

“And now it’s lost all fuckin’ meaning because some fuckin’ corpo scumbag is gonna rake in billions of Eddies off this shit. The sorta people who would pay preem to feel themselves getting nailed to the cross don’t give a fuck about a _message,_ Johnny, they’re gonna blow their load because they’re a sick fuck who can’t goon to regular porn anymore ‘cus it won’t get ‘em off. The corps certainly don’t care about anything except what’ll sell well and make publicity. Nobody sure as fuck gives a damn about Joshua Stephenson — I know I didn’t. Now I’ll never be able to forget ‘em.”

Long silence. Too long, the kind that left V alone with her thoughts. She hated being alone; liked when Johnny was around. Somebody to talk to whenever she needed it; seemed like he could tell when she was down in it. Hated the fucker, but he was her best friend. V rest her forehead on the pad of her thumb and index finger, hunched over on the bench like she’d just dropped her smoke. A car or truck or something passed by, audience of one for a mercenary’s daily breakdown.

Sensation bloomed, TV static in her brain, then an ethereal warmth at her side offset by the cold of steel digits. Johnny’s hand on the back of her neck, delicate squeeze, fooled her into thinking it released some of the tension in her shoulders. She looked over at him and took a drag as a silent “thank-you.”

“Why’d you do it if you knew it was gonna end like this? You went into it knowin’ full well what was gonna come of it.”

“Because I wanted to kill the bastard myself,” V said. Exasperation dragged down every single word. “Like—… maybe out of mercy, to put the poor fuck out of his misery. But really, I just—… seeing the pain in Jablonsky’s face, watching that woman break down, all juxtaposed with this… smug born-again _fuck_ sittin’ there preaching about forgiveness and sins, and I just… I wanted to kill him. To punish him.”

Tears started to come, but the eyes wouldn’t let her cry. Salty tears in her mouth, and then spit on the sidewalk. “But what the fuck gives me that right? Do you know how many people I’ve killed, Johnny? I sure as hell don’t. How many husbands have I widowed, or how many mothers have I made cry? I kill for money, he killed for the thrill. No difference between it, just… selfishness.”

“You do what you gotta do in this fuckin’ place, V. No need to throw a pity party because you’ve made heads roll before.”

“It’s not a _pity party,_ asshole, it’s... it’s me lookin’ at what I’ve done and thinkin’ that, hell, maybe I should be put up on the cross, too. No BD, no fancy last words, no script, just… leave me to bleed. Part of me doesn’t wanna find the answer to our little problem’n just… take the pills until there’s nothing left anymore. Let you have my body, all my burdens that come with my name, leave it all behind…”

“And be a quitter.”

She snorted and forced a smirk. “Yeah, guess so.”

“And that ain’t you, V. Only reason we made it this far’s because you’re too much of a donkey’s ass to know when to give up. And so am I, for that matter. If you take even one of those pills without me explicitly givin’ you permission I’m gonna rip your tits off, I swear to God. Besides — don’t really want your body, not permanently. Don’t know if a life without a dick is a life worth living.”

“You’re—… such a dumbass, you know that?” In spite of it all she laughed. Spat, laughed again, took a drag. Even Johnny was smiling, a bit — rare as rain in Night City.

“Didn’t make a reputation for my brains, now did I?”

“No. No, you didn’t. Just… regrets, you know? Should have shot him in the back of the head on the way into that studio. His pig manager too, for that matter. Two birds, one stone — kill the fucker and make sure that the fuckin’ corpos can’t profit off his passion. Gut her from behind while I dome him, or just throw a grenade and run, or… something. _Fuck._ Instead I just fucked it all up like I always do.”

Johnny grimaced, took his hand off V’s neck like she was contagious, and rest his elbows on his knees. “You’ve got maybe two or three weeks before I take over entirely and your personality goes by-by. A life ain’t worth sittin’ on regrets all day even when you’ve got a hundred years to live, much less a fraction of that. So quit mopin’ and worryin’ about what you’ve done wrong, all right?”

V kept quiet for as long as she could stand it. Spat again, ashed the cigarette, snubbed the butt under her boot. “Too late.”


End file.
